Spike Lee and Godard go to Cannes, but Netflix cans Orson Welles

PARIS (Reuters) - Spike Lee and Jean-Luc Godard will compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes next month, but a posthumous movie by Orson Welles will not be screened due to a dispute between the film festival organizers and Netflix.

Announcing the line-up for the festival that runs from May 8-19, artistic director Thierry Fremaux said he regretted the absence of Netflix, which entered two major movies last year but has said it cannot abide by rules that would force it to release them in French theaters, delaying its ability to stream them.

“It’s a pity,” said Fremaux. “Everybody wished to see the film.”

Netflix had planned to present “The Other Side of the Wind”, a movie Welles shot in the 1970s but never finished editing, as well as “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead”, a documentary about the filmmaker, who died in 1985.

The competition will open with “Todos Los Saben” (“Everybody Knows”), a film starring Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem made in Spain by double-Oscar winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi.

Among the close to twenty contenders in the main competition is Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman”, about an African-American police officer who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan.

Cannes is the biggest gathering of the global movie industry, but also a glamorous occasion where photographers as well as stars must comply with a strict red-carpet dress code, and Fremaux confirmed that the festival wanted to stop the undignified modern habit of selfie-taking.

Anyone trying to pull a fast one with their mobile phones on the red-carpet risks being ejected.